The continuous increase of software complexity in embedded systems reflects on applications consisting of a large number of concurrent activities that share common computational resources. Several of such applications have stringent performance requirements and may have to execute on different hardware platforms, including multi-core heterogeneous architectures with specialized computational units.
Designing, analyzing, and programming such complex systems is currently done by ad-hoc practices, which often lead to inefficient solutions and unpredictable behavior. The development of a solid design framework for exploiting next generation platforms represents a key research challenge for the near future, affecting operating system mechanisms, analysis methodologies, and development tools, which today are mostly available for single core platforms.
The objective of this talk is to introduce the key requirements that a software framework should have to simplify programming, analysis, and implementation of parallel real-time applications on multi-core platforms.

About Prof. Giorgio Buttazzo

Giorgio Buttazzo is Full Professor of Computer Engineering at the Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna of Pisa. He graduated in Electronic Engineering at the University of Pisa in 1985, received a Master in Computer Science at the University of Pennsylvania in 1987, and a Ph.D. in Computer Engineering at the Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna of Pisa in 1991. He has been Chair of the IEEE Technical Committee on Real-Time Systems, and Program Chair and General Chair of the major international conferences on real-time computing. He is Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Real-Time Systems (Springer) and Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Industrial Informatics.
In 2012 he become IEEE Fellow "for contributions to dynamic scheduling algorithms in real-time systems". In 2013, he received the Outstanding Technical Contributions and Leadership Award, from the IEEE Technical Committee on Real-Time Systems. He has authored 6 books on real-time systems and over 200 papers in the field of real-time systems, robotics, and neural networks.

Today’s Defense missions rely on massive amounts of sensor data collected by intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) platforms. Not only has the volume of sensor data increased exponentially, there has also been a dramatic increase in the complexity of analysis required for applications such as target identification and tracking. The digital processors used for ISR data analysis are limited by power requirements, potentially limiting the speed and type of data analysis that can be done. Furthermore, as Moore’s Law slows down, power scaling has more or less stopped.
The Microsystems Technology Office (MTO) at DARPA has two programs that directly target this problem: Power Efficiency Research For Embedded Computing Technologies (PERFECT) and Unconventional Processing of Signals for Intelligent Data Exploitation (UPSIDE).
The PERFECT program is motivated by the observation that if we are to provide real-time situational awareness, we must improve the energy efficiency of on-platform computation. PERFECT attacks this problem within the digital CMOS domain at all levels, from devices up through algorithms. Near-threshold transistor operation is also a key feature of this technical approach.
The UPSIDE program seeks to break the status quo of digital processing with methods of video and imagery analysis based on the physics of nanoscale devices. UPSIDE processing will be non-digital and fundamentally different from current digital processors and the power and speed limitations associated with them. Unlike traditional digital processors that operate by executing specific instructions to compute, it is envisioned that UPSIDE arrays will rely on a higher level computational element based on probabilistic inference embedded within a digital system.

About Prof. Dan Hammerstrom

Dan Hammerstrom joined DARPA as a Program Manager in March, 2012. He came to DARPA from Portland State University, where he is a Professor in the Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) department. He received a Doctor of Philosophy in Electrical Engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1977.
From 1977 to 1980, Dr. Hammerstrom was an Assistant Professor in the Electrical Engineering Department at Cornell University. In 1980 he joined Intel in Oregon, where he was involved in computer architecture and VLSI design. In 1988 he founded Adaptive Solutions, Inc., which specialized in high performance silicon technology (the CNAPS chip set) for image processing, neural network emulation, and pattern recognition.
Dr. Hammerstrom is a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE) and has a joint appointment with Halmstad University, Halmstad Sweden.

To make transportation safer, more efficient, and cleaner, intelligent transport services are currently being intensely investigated and developed. Such services require dependable wireless vehicle-to-infrastructure and vehicle-to-vehicle communications providing robust connectivity at moderate data rates. Key characteristics of vehicular channels are shadowing by other vehicles, high Doppler shifts, and inherent non-stationarity. All have major impact on the data packet transmission reliability and latency. This talk provides an overview of key characteristics in a variety of vehicular environments. Finally, we discuss the implications for wireless system design with a strong focus on IEEE 802.11p.

About Prof. Christoph Mecklenbräuker

C. F. Mecklenbräuker received the Dipl.-Ing. degree in electrical engineering from Technische Universität Wien, Austria, in 1992 and the Dr.-Ing. degree from Ruhr-Universität Bochum, Germany, in 1998. His doctoral dissertation received the Gert-Massenberg Prize in 1998. He was with Siemens, Vienna, from 1997 to 2000. From 2000 to 2006, he was senior researcher with the Forschungszentrum Telekommunikation Wien (FTW), Austria. In 2006, he joined the Institute of Telecommunications as full professor with the Technische Universität Wien, Austria. Since 2009 he leads the Christian Doppler Laboratory for Wireless Technologies for Sustainable Mobility. His research interests include waves, sparsity, vehicular connectivity, ultrawideband radio, and MIMO-techniques. Dr. Mecklenbräuker is a member of the IEEE Signal Processing, Antennas and Propagation, and Vehicular Technology Societies, VDE and EURASIP.

The Kahn Process Network (KPN) is a well known but underused model of parallel
computation, especially well suited to high performance real-time embedded
computing. It combines low development and debug effort with efficiency, modular
reuse, reliability and extreme scalability.
A 336 processor KPN in a single silicon device, commercially released in 2007,
found wide acceptance in real-time embedded video, computer vision, baseband
wireless and medical imaging applications, as well as university research. A realtime medical X-ray system using thirty-two of these devices implemented a KPN
with over ten thousand processors. Today's FPGAs are ideal silicon platforms for
KPN implementations.
This talk introduces the KPN and silicon KPNs, explores its characteristics and
development process, and surveys embedded system applications and research. An
open source hardware KPN implemented as an FPGA overlay is presented.

About Mike Butts

Mike Butts is a senior technologist in the verification group at Synopsys. He was
chief architect at massively parallel processor vendor Ambric, a CPU architect
at Nvidia, and co-founded FPGA vendor Tabula. Mike co-invented FPGA-based
hardware logic emulation, and architected a number of reconfigurable FPGA and
crossbar chips and system products at Quickturn and Cadence, where he was a
Cadence Fellow.
Mike has 50 US patents and ten IEEE published papers. His paper on the Ambric
KPN architecture won a best-in-twenty-years award at IEEE's FCCM reconfigurable
computing conference. His BSEE and MSEE/CS degrees are from M.I.T.

Several important resource allocation problems in wireless networks fit within the common framework of Constraint Satisfaction Problems (CSPs). These include channel allocation, power control, transmission scheduling and network coding. Inspired by the requirements of these applications, where variables are located at distinct network devices that may not be able to communicate but may interfere, we define natural criteria that a CSP solver must possess in order to be practical. We introduce a stochastic decentralized CSP solver, sketching how it provably finds a solution should one exist and illustrating its other desirable features. Using an implementation on a wireless testbed we demonstrate the decentralized solver's practical utility for one of the fundamental challenges in wireless networks, namely interference management by appropriate channel allocation.

About Prof. Doug Leith

Prof. Doug Leith is Director of the Hamilton Institute (www.hamilton.ie) at the National University of Ireland Maynooth, an applied mathematics research institute focussing on communication networks. Doug's research interests include network congestion control, coding/information theory, oprimisation and resource allocation in wireless networks.

Actors naturally extend the concept of objects to concurrent
computation. Actor programming has seen renewed interest with the
growth of multicore computers, sensor networks, web services, and
cloud computing. Actor languages and frameworks in current use
include Erlang, E Language, Scala/Akka, Ptolemy, SALSA,
Charm++, ActorFoundry, Asynchronous Agents Library and Orleans.
Some well-known applications built using actors include Twitter's
message queuing system, Lift Web Framework, Facebook chat and
Vendetta's game engine. The presentation will formally define the
Actor model and discuss its advantages: enforcing modularity and
provide flexibility in scheduling, placement, and mobility. I will then
summarize progress in methods to facilitate reasoning about actor
programs and discuss issues in efficiently implementing actor systems.
Finally, I will describe some challenges in building and maintaining large
Actor systems.

About Prof. Gul Agha

Gul Agha is Professor of Computer Science at the University of
Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His research is in the area of
programming models and languages for open distributed and embedded
computation. Dr. Agha is a Fellow of the Institute for Electrical
Engineering and Electronics (IEEE). He is a recipient of the Naval
Young Investigator Award from ONR, the IEEE Computer Society
Meritorious Service Award, and the ACM Recognition of Service Award.
He served as Editor-in-Chief of IEEE Concurrency: Parallel,
Distributed and Mobile Computing (1994-98), and of ACM Computing
Surveys (1999-2007). His book on Actors, published by MIT Press, is
among the most widely cited works. He has published over 150 research
articles and supervised over 20 PhD dissertations.

Continuous-time Markov chains (CTMC) are often used to study the performance and reliability/availability of computer and communication systems. However, the construction and the solution of such CTMCs is a tedious and error-prone procedure, especially when the system under consideration is complex. Stochastic Petri nets (SPN) of various ilk and the corresponding software packages offer the capability of succinct specification, automated generation and the solution of the underlying CTMC. This talk will first provide a brief tutorial on stochastic Petri nets and then provide a recent application to IaaS cloud. It will end with extensions to SPNs such as the Markov regenerative SPN that allows general distributions and the Fluid stochastic Petri net that allows jointly continuous and discrete state spaces.

About Prof. Kishor Trivedi

Kishor S. Trivedi holds the Hudson Chair in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Duke University. He has been on the Duke faculty since 1975. He is the author of a well-known text entitled, Probability and Statistics with Reliability, Queuing and Computer Science Applications, published by John Wiley. He has also published two other books entitled, Performance and Reliability Analysis of Computer Systems. He is a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. He has published over 490 articles and has supervised 44 Ph.D. dissertations. He is the recipient of IEEE Computer Society Technical Achievement Award for his research on Software Aging and Rejuvenation. He works closely with industry in carrying our reliability/availability analysis, providing short courses and in the development and dissemination of software packages such as SHARPE and SPNP.

The last few years have seen significant progress in our understanding of how one should structure multi-robot systems. New control, coordination, and communication strategies have emerged and, in this talk, we summarize some of these developments. In particular, we will discuss how to go from local control rules to global behaviors in a systematic manner in order to achieve distributed geometric objectives, such as achieving and maintaining formations, area coverage, and swarming behaviors. We will also investigate how users can interact with networks of mobile robots in order to inject new information and objectives. The efficacy of these interactions depends directly on the interaction dynamics and the structure of the underlying information-exchange network. We will relate these network-level characteristics to controllability notions in order to produce effective human-swarm interaction strategies.

About Prof. Magnus Egerstedt

Magnus Egerstedt is the Schlumberger Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology, where he has been on the faculty since 2001. He received the M.S. degree in Engineering Physics and the Ph.D. degree in Applied Mathematics from the Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden, and the B.A. degree in Philosophy from Stockholm University. Dr. Egerstedt's research interests include hybrid and networked control, with applications in motion planning, control, and coordination of mobile robots. Magnus Egerstedt is the director of the Georgia Robotics and Intelligent Systems Laboratory (GRITS Lab), a Fellow of the IEEE, and a received the ECE/GT Outstanding Junior Faculty Member Award, the Georgia Tech Teaching Efficiency Award, and the CAREER Award from the U.S. National Science Foundation.

Many important tasks such as vehicle navigation, unmanned system teleoperation, and robotic surgery require human operators to interact with a computer controlled mechanical system. Currently, there is intense research activity devoted toward complete automation of system operation. However, human operators will remain "in the loop" for the foreseeable future, due to various technical issues, legal issues, and social issues. The development of shared control methods for operator assistance, safeguarding, and augmentation are thus a necessary component of future intelligent systems.
This talk will present an approach to shared human-machine control (i.e. “semi-autonomous control”) that is abstracted as a constraint planning problem. In this approach, constraints are defined to bound a safe operational region of the physical environment, input space, and state space. Methods for "threat assessment" are used to estimate the hazard level of a given scenario, and this threat estimate is used to partition control between the human operator and the control system. Simulated and experimental results are presented in the context of manned and unmanned (i.e. teleoperated) vehicle navigation, and demonstrate the framework’s ability to robustly ensure vehicle safety while sharing control with a human driver.

About Dr. Karl Iagnemma

Karl Iagnemma is a principal research scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he directs the Robotic Mobility Group. He holds a B.S. from the University of Michigan, and an M.S. and Ph.D. from MIT, where he was a National Science Foundation Graduate Fellow. He has performed postdoctoral research at MIT, and has been a visiting researcher at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the National Technical University of Athens (Greece), and is currently a Guest Professor at Halmstad University. He is a current or past associate editor of the IEEE Transactions on Robotics and the Journal of Field Robotics.
Dr. Iagnemma's primary research interests are in the areas of design, sensing, motion planning, and control of mobile robots in outdoor terrain, including modeling and analysis of robot-terrain interaction. He is author of the monograph Mobile Robots in Rough Terrain: Estimation, Planning and Control with Application to Planetary Rovers (Springer, 2004), and co-editor of a pair of widely read books on the DARPA Grand Challenge and Urban Challenge unmanned vehicle races. He has recently led research programs for agencies including the U.S. Army Tank-Automotive and Armaments Command, the Army Research Office, DARPA, the NASA Mars Program Office, Nissan, Ford Motor Company, and the NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts, among others. He has authored or co-authored over 100 conference and journal papers on a wide range of robotic topics, and has consulted for various private companies and government agencies.

This talk discusses the opportunities and research challenges
faced in the modeling, analysis and control of the human heart. Consisting
of more than 4 billion communication nodes, interconnected through a very
sophisticated communication structure, this ultimate cyber-physical system
achieves with an astonishing reliability, the electric synchronization and the
mechanical contraction of all of its nodes, in order to pump blood, during
what is commonly known as a heart beat. However, even this cyber-physical
system, engineered by billion years of evolution is fallible, and predicting its
failure is a great challenge for our society.

About Prof. Radu Grosu

Radu Grosu is a Professor and Head of the Dependable-Systems
Group at the Faculty of Informatics of the Vienna University of Technology, and
a Research Professor at the Computer Science Department of the State
University of New York at Stony Brook. His research interests include modeling,
analysis and control of cyber-physical and biological systems and his application
focus includes green operating systems, mobile ad-hoc networks, automotive
systems, the Mars rover, cardiac-cell networks and genetic regulatory networks.
Grosu is the recipient of the National Science Foundation Career Award, the State
University of New York Research Foundation Promising Inventor Award, the ACM
Service Award, and a member of the International Federation of Information
Processing WG 2.2. Before receiving his appointment at the Vienna University of
Technology, Grosu was an Associate Professor in the Computer Science Department
of the State University of New York at Stony Brook, where he co- directed the
Concurrent-Systems laboratory and co-founded the Systems-Biology laboratory.
Grosu earned his Dr.rer.nat. in Computer Science from the Technical University of
München, and was a Research Associate in the Computer Science Department
of the University of Pennsylvania.

CPS design flows span physical and computational domains and incorporate software synthesis for cyber and manufacturability concerns for physical components. Heterogeneity is the norm as well as the main challenge: components and systems are modeled using multiple physical, logical, functional and non-functional modeling aspects. Traditional design flows use the separation of concern principle to decompose the overall design problem into manageable problem sizes. However, the fundamental goal of model-based design - to move toward a correct-by-construction design technology - requires modeling and analyzing cross-domain interactions among physical and cyber domains and demands understanding the effects of heterogeneous abstraction layers in the design flow. The talk will summarize progress and lessons learned during the development of a design tool chain for real-life applications in vehicle application domains.

About Prof. Janos Sztipanovits

Dr. Janos Sztipanovits is currently the E. Bronson Ingram Distinguished Professor of Engineering at Vanderbilt University and he also holds the Joe B. Wyatt Distinguished University Professor title in 2012/2013. He is founding director of the Institute for Software Integrated Systems (ISIS). His research areas are at the intersection of systems and computer science and engineering. His current research interest includes the foundation and applications of Model-Integrated Computing for the design of Cyber Physical Systems. His other research contributions include structurally adaptive systems, autonomous systems, design space exploration and systems-security co-design technology. He was founding chair of the ACM Special Interest Group on Embedded Software (SIGBED). He served as program manager and acting deputy director of DARPA/ITO between 1999 and 2002 and he was member of the US Air Force Scientific Advisory Board between 2006-2010. He is member of the Academic Executive Board of Cyber-Physical Systems Virtual Organization and he is member of the national steering group. Dr. Sztipanovits was elected Fellow of the IEEE in 2000 and external member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in 2010. He won the National Prize in Hungary in 1985 and the Golden Ring of the Republic in 1982. He graduated (Summa Cum Laude) from the Technical University of Budapest in 1970 and received his doctorate from the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in 1980.

Vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) and vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) communication hold great promise for significantly reducing the human and financial costs of vehicle collisions. A common characteristic of this communication is the broadcast of a device’s core state information at regular intervals, e.g. via the Cooperative Awareness Message defined by ETSI, or the Basic Safety Message defined by SAE. Unless controlled, the aggregate of these broadcasts will congest the channel under dense traffic scenarios. This talk explores the problems and characteristics of this congestion, and presents a congestion control approach based on adapting safety message transmission rates. The LInear MEssage Rate Integrated Control (LIMERIC) algorithm uses linear, as opposed to binary, adaptive feedback to keep channel load at a level that achieves high throughput and acceptable MAC frame collision probability. LIMERIC has provable stability and fairness properties. The talk also presents extensions to LIMERIC that enable differentiated transmission opportunities based on vehicle characteristics (e.g. dynamics). Analytical and NS-2 simulation results are presented that illustrate the performance and key characteristics of LIMERIC.

About Dr. John Kenney

John Kenney leads a vehicular networking research team at Toyota InfoTechnology Center in Mountain View, California. Research interests include wireless protocols at the MAC and Physical layers, congestion control, security, and performance optimization. He represents Toyota in the CAMP VSC consortium and in international standards organizations including IEEE, SAE, and ETSI. He was General Co-Chair of the ACM VANET Workshop in 2011 and 2012. He holds a Bachelor’s degree and Ph.D. from the University of Notre Dame and a Master’s from Stanford University. He also was an adjunct professor at Notre Dame from 1990-2010. Prior to his work for Toyota his research interests included high speed Internet switches, QoS, and adaptive systems.

There is a growing deployment of wireless networks in industrial
control systems. Lower installation costs and easier system
reconfigurations for wireless devices can have a major influence on
the future application of distributed control and monitoring. There is
however a lack of theory for understanding if and how the allocation
of communication resources should be integrated with the control
application. In this talk, we will discuss how the access scheme for
the wireless medium can influence the closed-loop performance of the
networked control system. It will be argued that the underlying
scheduling-control problem has a non-classical information
structure. Appropriate models for medium access control protocols will
be introduced. It will be shown how these protocols can be tuned for
various wireless control applications. We will also see that by making
event-triggered transmissions based on decisions taken locally at the
sensor and actuator nodes, it is possible improve the design and to
limit the use of the communication resources. The talk will be
illustrated by several examples from ongoing projects with Swedish
industry. The presentation is based on joint work with several
collaborators.

About Prof. Karl H. Johansson

Karl H. Johansson is Director of the KTH ACCESS Linnaeus Centre and Professor at the School of Electrical Engineering, Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden. He is a Wallenberg Scholar and has held a six-year Senior Researcher Position with the Swedish Research Council. He is Director of the Stockholm Strategic Research Area ICT The Next Generation. He received MSc and PhD degrees in Electrical Engineering from Lund University. He has held visiting positions at UC Berkeley (1998-2000) and California Institute of Technology (2006-2007). His research interests are in networked control systems, hybrid and embedded system, and applications in smart transportation, energy, and automation systems. He has been a member of the IEEE Control Systems Society Board of Governors and the Chair of the IFAC Technical Committee on Networked Systems. He has been on the Editorial Boards of several journals, including Automatica, IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control, and IET Control Theory and Applications. He has been Guest Editor for special issues, including the one on "Wireless Sensor and Actuator Networks" of IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control 2011. He was the General Chair of the ACM/IEEE Cyber-Physical Systems Week 2010 in Stockholm and IPC Chair of many conferences. He has served on the Executive Committees of several European research projects in the area of networked embedded systems. In 2009, he received the Best Paper Award of the IEEE International Conference on Mobile Ad-hoc and Sensor Systems. In 2009, he was also awarded Wallenberg Scholar, as one of the first ten scholars from all sciences, by the Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation. He was awarded an Individual Grant for the Advancement of Research Leaders from the Swedish Foundation for Strategic Research in 2005. He received the triennial Young Author Prize from IFAC in 1996 and the Peccei Award from the International Institute of System Analysis, Austria, in 1993. He received Young Researcher Awards from Scania in 1996 and from Ericsson in 1998 and 1999. He is a Fellow of the IEEE.

The mission of the Mechatronics and Haptic Interfaces (MAHI) Lab at Rice University is to design, manufacture, and test mechatronic or robotic systems to model, rehabilitate, enhance, or augment the human sensorimotor control system. We are broadly focused on developments in machine design, control, and experimental methods in haptics research. Specifically, we employ a systems engineering approach, exploring the effects of force feedback on human performance in man-machine interactions with virtual and remote environments. In this talk, I will discuss several research thrusts in the lab. First, I will discuss work in robotic rehabilitation of the upper extremity following stroke and incomplete spinal cord injury. We have developed a range of techniques for ensuring active engagement of the participant in therapeutic interventions with robotic devices. Objective measures of motor impairment can provide frequent feedback to the participant regarding their performance during therapy. Control architectures can require initiation or sustained input from the user in order to generate desired movements. Further, controllers can be designed to adapt to the user’s changing capabilities, which may be dependent on position or direction of movement. Results from a variety of ongoing clinical evaluations will be discussed in relation to these topics. Second, I will discuss our work in the area of haptic guidance, or shared control between a robot and a human user. I will talk about our experiences in determining appropriate guidance algorithms and architectures based on task analysis and determination of successful human motor control strategies. I'll discuss the various types of guidance we have analyzed, and our outcomes for a number of tasks and architectures. Finally, I will discuss our work in sensory feedback for smart prosthetics, and the role of tactile and kinesthetic feedback for enhancing performance in positioning and manual control tasks. These research efforts embody the collaborative, interdisciplinary nature of my group’s research in biorobotics, haptics, neural engineering, and robotic rehabilitation.

About Dr. Marcia O’Malley

Marcia O’Malley received the B.S. degree in mechanical engineering from Purdue University in 1996, and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in mechanical engineering from Vanderbilt University in 1999 and 2001, respectively. In 2001 she joined the Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science Department at Rice University, where she is currently an Associate Professor and directs the Mechatronics and Haptic Interfaces Lab. She holds a joint appointment in Computer Science at Rice, and is an Adjunct Associate Professor in the Departments of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation at both Baylor College of Medicine and the University of Texas Medical School at Houston. Additionally, she is the Director of Rehabilitation Engineering at TIRR-Memorial Hermann Hospital, and is a co-founder of Houston Medical Robotics, Inc. At Rice, her research addresses issues that arise when humans physically interact with robotic systems, with a focus on training and rehabilitation in virtual environments. In 2008, she received the George R. Brown Award for Superior Teaching at Rice University. O’Malley is a 2004 Office of Naval Research Young Investigator and the recipient of the NSF CAREER Award in 2005. She received the Best Paper Award at the 2011 IEEE World Haptics Conference in Istanbul, Turkey. She is the former chair of the IEEE Technical Committee on Haptics and was on the founding editorial board for the IEEE Transactions on Haptics. She currently serves on the editorial board of the ASME/IEEE Transactions on Mechatronics.

When I started programming in 1967, program types referred to machine
representation formats. The high-level languages of that time
(e.g., Fortran) relied on type declarations to determine the meaning
of program operations like '+' and '*'.
In contrast, contemporary type systems for programming
languages are intricate mathematical constructions that can prove
theorems about program behavior. They also constitute an important issue
in "language wars" about which language is best for a particular
application. In this talk, I will review the evolution of type
systems since the 1967 and present a dispassionate account
(identifying my opinions in some cases) of the advantages and
disadvantages of various approaches to program typing. In the
process, I will identify a few of my contributions to the narrative.
I try to focus on the roles that type systems play in software
engineering and their interaction with program design.

About Professor Robert Cartwright

Robert “Corky” Cartwright has been a professor of Computer Science at Rice University since 1980. He earned a bachelor’s degree magna cum laude in Applied Mathematics from Harvard College in 1971 and a doctoral degree in Computer Science from Stanford University in 1977. Prior to joining the Rice faculty, he worked as an assistant professor at Cornell University. Throughout his career, his principal professional goal has been elevating programming from a black art to a systematic discipline.
Professor Cartwright's principal research interests are programming language design and implementation, program specification, program testing and analysis, and software engineering. He is currently engaged in five major research projects: (i) Soft Typing: developing program analysis tools for Java that use precise type inference to help programmers debug and optimize programs; (ii) Dr Java and DrScala : constructing production quality, open source, pedagogic programming environments for Java and Scala that foster test-driven software development; (iii) Testing Frameworks for Concurrent Programs: creating tools to support the systematic testing of Java programs with multiple threads of control; (iv) Simulation Frameworks for Hybrid Systems: developing new languages, environments, and simulation techniques for designing and prototyping systems where computer software interacts with physical components (e.g., robots); and (v) Denotational Models of Object-Oriented Languages: developing accurate semantic models of object-oriented languages like Java, C#, and Scala.

From 1991-1996 Professor Cartwright served as a member of the ACM Turing Award Committee, which selects the annual recipient of the most prestigious international prize for computer science research. In 1998, he was elected as a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), the leading professional organization for computer scientists. From 1991-1996 he served as a member of the ACM Turing Award Committee, which selects the annual recipient of the most prestigious international prize for computer science research. He served as a member of the Board of Directors for the Computing Research Association from 1994-2000 and helped organize the Coalition to Diversity Computing. In 1998, he was elected as a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), the leading professional organization for computer scientists. He has also served as a member of ACM Education Board from 1997-2006 and a member of Sun Microsystems Developer Advisory Council from 2002-2009. He currently serves a member of the Computer Science Advisory Council at Prairie View A&M University.